


someday you will die

by zjofierose



Series: Sheith Angst Week 2019 [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura is a boss bitch, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Naxzela, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide, and I mean that as a compliment, clone!shiro who doesn't know it yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-06 04:56:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20501252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: Keith's run at the shields on Naxzela is successful in more ways than one.





	someday you will die

**Author's Note:**

> MIND THE TAGS. I am super not joking. 
> 
> Written for the day 2 prompt of "too late" for Sheith Angst Week 2019.
> 
> Because September is National Suicide Awareness Month, and due to the loss of yet another member of my extended family to suicide (not to mention the friends and classmates), I will be dedicating my @sheithangstweek fics this week to suicide prevention. Please see my twitter (@zjofierose) for further info.

Shiro watches it on the screen, watches as Keith’s ship disappears in a tiny flash of light. A second later, the energy barrier dissipates, but Shiro barely notices. There’s a roaring in his ears, the stars are spinning around him, and it feels like time has stopped still.

Later, he’s not sure how he makes it back to the Castle - maybe he doesn’t, maybe it’s Black who just takes him there. The other paladins are standing motionless in the hangar, waiting for him, but he can’t make words, can’t do anything other than stare at the empty spot where Keith should be. 

“Come on,” Coran says at last, coming to stand beside him. Coran doesn’t touch him, for which Shiro’s grateful - he’s not sure he could stand it. “Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

Coran walks forward, an air of inevitable authority emanating from his person, and Shiro follows him blindly, because what else can he do?

\--

It’s several weeks before it really begins to settle in that Keith isn’t coming back: he’d been gone working with the Blades for long enough that his absence is a familiar, if aching, hole. The difference now is only that there are no comms from him, no messages. Shiro keeps waiting for one, mindlessly checking his padd to see what Keith has to say.

But no, Keith is gone, shattered into a hundred million fragments of light. There was no body, no family to console, no funeral to plan. They’re too busy to do anything other than keep fighting, keep making alliances, keep trying to win the war. 

Everyone is tiptoeing around him, like Shiro doesn’t know, like he won’t notice, and it’s driving him slowly mad. Hunk makes too many cookies, and keeps leaving them on plates outside Shiro’s quarters. Lance is a wet blanket, maudlin and melancholy by turns. Pidge pulls all-nighters till she crashes working with Coran to try to innovate something, anything, that will be an effective weapon and bring them closer to ending this interminable war. 

Allura, at least, is honest in her grief, refocusing immediately on the continued growth of the coalition and defeat of Zarkon. Shiro can respect her priorities in a way he knows Keith never would have - while Keith had served with the Blade he had remained a valuable ally as a strategic communicator and a capable leader, but the finality of his absence makes little overall difference to the effort. She doesn’t apologize, and Shiro doesn’t ask it of her.

If he were less selfish, if he were a better leader, Shiro thinks, he would be able to use Keith’s death as a rallying point, as something to pull the team together and help rededicate them to the cause. But he’s not, and he isn’t, and so he takes to riding out in Black on his own, making stealth raids on Galra bases, slipping in and murdering hundreds before he disappears into the ever-present night. He is, after all, the Champion, Haggar’s creation and trained for destruction. The least he can do is live up to his title.

\--

He begins to have headaches, to hear voices when he’s in Black. He wants to think that they’re Keith, wants to believe anything beyond what he is slowly growing to suspect to be true: that he is not himself, that he is not free. That he is just as much a tool now as he ever was in the Arena, and that he is only a waiting pawn in the larger game.

He takes his arm to Pidge under the guise of it needing a tune-up, and reads the same fears in her clever face, the code that will be their undoing reflecting off the lenses which hide her eyes. She smiles brightly and tells him he’s all set, but he can feel the way that she shrinks from him ever-so-slightly when he stands, his bulk looming over her small frame. He can’t blame her; she’s only confirming what he’s already known.

The headaches worsen, but he leads mission after mission, leaning into the battles like he’s got sand under his feet, like each swing, each shot, of a robeast signals the end. It’s not hard, because it’s true, and even when he feels like he can’t possibly give anything further, he picks himself up and goes again. There’s always more to give, until there isn’t.

Keith, he reminds himself, gave everything.

\--

Things, inevitably, fall apart.

“Shiro,” Allura tells him one evening as she stands outside his door, “I’m concerned.”

Shiro steps aside wordlessly and lets her into his room. She walks in, letting the door close behind her, but does not take a seat. Instead, she stands regally in the center of the room and regards him with a critical eye.

“It’s been months. You must move on. For the sake of the team.”

Shiro drops his head. “I apologize for my failure as the leader of Voltron. I am happy to cede Black to you, should you wish it.”

“Shiro,” she folds her arms, “even if I did wish it, Black wouldn’t stand for it.” She sighs and drops her gaze. When she looks up at him again, her eyes are sad. “Shiro, I know better than anyone else except for maybe Coran what it is like to lose the people dearest to you. But you  _ have _ to work past this. For the team’s sake. For the universe’s sake.”

He’s shaking, Shiro realizes with a jolt, and the purple glow in the room is coming from his arm. The sickly lavender gleam of it reflects in Allura’s eyes, but she stands her ground.

“How dare you,” Shiro grits out, his voice something he barely recognizes, torn from a throat past a boulder of grief. “How  _ dare _ you compare a loss like yours to a loss like mine. Keith was… he was  _ everything _ to me.”

Allura’s eyes harden like ice, and her voice when she speaks is the coldest he’s ever heard. “You think losing my entire civilization save for one man is less a grief than losing a single person?”

There’s a faint shred of rationality clawing at the back of Shiro’s brain, but it’s too little too late. All he can hear is the static that ripples between the stars, the voices in his head rising to a crescendo that drowns out everything that stands between the Champion and victory. He raises his arm.

“ _ Get out, _ ” he tells her, and Allura lifts her chin.

“Get it together, Shiro,” she says, “I won’t tell you again.”

\--

He goes to Keith’s room for the first time that night, placing his hand on the touchpad and waiting as the door swishes open. It’s dim, even with the lights on; Keith must’ve set the light levels low, Shiro thinks, and wonders again at all he’ll never know about who Keith had become before…

He pushes the thought away, and goes to sit on Keith’s bed. It’s neatly made, the Garrison influence still strong. Keith’s red jacket hangs on the wall, his red and white boots neatly placed in the corner. His blade, of course, was with him.

Shiro lies down on the bed, stretching out carefully. He kicks his shoes off and stares at the curve of the ceiling above him. The room feels sterile, empty. Keith hadn’t been here for months before his last flight - it’s a home that has been abandoned, a room with no warmth, no hope, no answers.

He rolls over on the bed, and something clinks beneath the pillow. Shiro shoves a hand beneath, fishing around until his fingers close on a metal chain. He pulls his hand free, dragging his unexpected prize into the dim light. 

Shiro squints. Keith was wearing his tags when he left for the Blade, Shiro knows because he felt them clink against his own when he hugged Keith goodbye. He tips the metal plates in his hand to the light, eyes moving over the characters.  _ Shirogane, Takashi _ , one says;  _ Kogane, Keith, _ reads its mate. Their extras, Shiro realizes, from before Kerberos - Keith had kept them all this time.

Shiro pulls them over his head and breaks down.

\--

It’s the only time he allows himself the luxury of crying for Keith. 

\--

Time slips past him after that, faster, then slower, a litany of battles and diplomatic meetings and forming Voltron. Then all at once the headaches become worse than ever, and he’s stealing a ship and going where the witch bids him and he’s _grateful_ to be gone, grateful that his end is surely nearing. 

He finds the strength within himself to bring the Champion to life once again, to betray the very programming pressed into his neurons as surely as soldiers in the belly of a wooden horse, and turns. As he plunges his arm into Haggar’s chest and feels her magic lighting him up from inside, the voices in his head abruptly go quiet. He can feel his sight dimming as he falls to the floor, and the interior of the ship around him fades to blissful purple darkness.

_ Finally _ , Shiro whispers, and then,  _ Keith _ , and then he is still. 

**Author's Note:**

> points awarded to the house of whomever finds the easter egg


End file.
